Quartz is the graphics layer that sits on top of the Darwin core of Mac OS X, sometimes also referred to as CoreGraphics. Quartz directly supports Aqua by displaying two-dimensional graphics to create the user interface, including on-the-fly rendering and anti-aliasing with sub-pixel precision.
There are two components that make up Quartz:
Quartz Compositor - A compositing windowing system that manages and composites off-screen window bitmaps to create the Mac OS X user interface.
Quartz 2D - A graphics library which uses the PDF document format to draw two-dimensional text and graphics.
